MDenham wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Huh?! That's tortuous non-logic, Joph. Even coming from you.
No, that's you willfully ignoring what Varus's statement is.
No. It's me scratching my head trying to figure out how comparing the number of Dems who voted *against* the HCR bill to the number of GOP who voted *for* it tells us a damn thing at all.
Quote:
Varus's statement is "the Democrats' leadership is pressuring its members to vote as a single bloc".
Sure. But he didn't say that the GOP *didn't* do the same on their side of the HCR issue. Hence, Joph's response makes no sense at all. The point is that the Dems put enormous pressure on their members to pass Health Care. Elne was implying that she'd never seen such pressure on a party before (pointing at the GOP), so it's relevant to point out the HCR bill.
You're also stripping out a key component of Elne's statement. It wasn't just about voting in a block, or being pressured to do so, but *how* they were pressured. Specifically, pressured with threats about support in the next election. If you think that the GOP had to pressure it's members to vote how they did on Health Care, you really failed to grasp the positions. The GOP largely voted against health care (nearly unanimously btw), not because of pressure from the party leaders, but because they didn't agree with the bill. The biggest pressure came from voters, and I'll go out on a limb and assume that's the kind of political pressure which is acceptable for something like this.
On the Dem side though, many did not want to support health care because they were worried about losing their seats if they did. The leadership applied exactly the sort of pressure on them that Elne was talking about. Their own members were put in a position of choosing to vote in a way that their constituents didn't like or in a way that would lose their party support in the next election. There's a reason why it passed with the bare minimum number of votes. Every Democrat who could get out of voting for the health care bill did. That's incredibly telling.
Quote:
Joph's response pretty well shows that if they are, they're not doing a very good job of it - certainly, there's less unity there than there is among the Republicans.
Except the GOP unity is based on ideology, while the Dem unity is based on pressure from their leadership. This is why Joph's comparison is so meaningless. In this case, the fact that as many Dems voted against the bill as could get away with it while still passing the bill is the clue that the leadership was herding them. His comparison doesn't show what he seemed to imply it did.
Quote:
Whether or not the unity among Republicans is because of pressure from the leadership, herd instinct, or what have you isn't really answered, so it's more like "here's half of an answer" from Joph, but it's better than no answer at all. For now.
It's pretty clear that the unity among Republicans was because that's their position on the issue. If there was pressure, it was from their constituents, not the party leadership. I just don't see how you can compare the two. Again, the fact that the Dems passed health care with the minimum number of votes needed shows you all you need to know about how unpopular the bill was and the degree to which the leadership had to play political games to pass it.
